Acorn

As X shuts down Communities, Acorn debuts an alternative that puts creators in control | TechCrunch

Acorn lets organizations build and run their own online communities using decentralized tech, with custom feeds, moderation, and analytics tools.

Blacksky As a Service: a First Look at Acorn - AT Protocol

Rishi Balakrishnan joins to talk about the work that went into building Acorn, Blacksky's new platform for creating moderated communities on atproto — and why the landing page never mentions a PDS.

Composable Trust, Part 1: Communities Without Credible Exit - Eclectic Corvine Muses

We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?

Introducing Acorn: Community Infrastructure That Grows With You

Featured image: Emergence by Paul Lewin

Social Platform Directory

We are mapping all the social platforms in Europe. This directory is growing every day based on input from people all around Europe. It is a collective piece of work. The platforms mapped are here because someone told us about their existence or directed us to a list, where they were mentioned. All are mapped as precisely as possible based on publicly available information. Is there a platform we should know about, or some information that should be adjusted? Let us know.

We Needn't Have a One True Platform - Aaron Ross Powell

On Bluesky, user numbers, and the silliness of endless growth.

To people that donate to OSS, what platform do you prefer to use to donate?

40 votes, 27 comments. I am asking since I've only setup GitHub Sponsors for my project, but I feel like some people might not want to use that and I…

Let's fund the open social web

A pro-social approach to building better platforms

Platform Cooperativism Consortium | A hub that helps you start, grow, or convert to platform co-ops.

A hub that helps you start, grow, or convert to platform co-ops.

Community by Design

Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.